A few days before I reached Abercorn, short of two loads, whose carriers had fallen sick on the way, one of these crises had begun to darken the horizon. I was privileged to hear at least one side of the question that was dividing the township, the side of which Mrs. Lavater was protagonist. Lavater was the D.C., and very kindly he had housed me until my loads caught up and I could go on to my fishing camp.
Mrs. Lavater is one of those big-boned, deep-bosomed, high-coloured women, who have done so much to make the Empire what it is. Were they endowed with any sense of humour, would that Empire be what it is? It is a doubtful question.
'What I told Mackenzie,' she was saying as she poured out the China tea for which she was rightly famous, 'was that the money was raised by the golf club and it ought to be spent on improving the golf course. I say we could start a new nine holes.'
King Arthur could not have mentioned the Quest of the Holy Grail in tones of greater reverence.
'It's all because,' she sank her voice, 'Mrs. Mackenzie won—or so she told me—a silver inkstand in the mixed doubles at Eastbourne in 1913. That's why he's fussing about a tennis court.'
I was lost in banal admiration of our race. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there shall golf, tennis and the seeds of England's greatness be found.
'They find a desert and leave it a links,' I murmured.
Mrs. Lavater said she was delighted that I agreed with her about the second nine.... She stared firmly out of the window. Had her pince-nez been endowed with supernatural vision; could they have pierced a range of tree-clad hills and embraced a couple of hundred miles of forest and lake; she might at that moment have seen Archie's carriers splashing knee deep in the tepid water, tugging at the lushishi cords, which dragged the second raft, grating down its path of rollers, reluctantly on to the lake.
The other raft already rode on the mirror-like surface. On its rough-hewn timbers a pile of bedding had been arranged for Norah. Her neat white clothes looked incongruous, for the uncouth craft and the theatrical blue of sky and water seemed to demand for passenger some shaggy Crusoe of pantomime.
Rifle in hand, Archie knelt on a round black rock that projected into the lake, his neck stretched and his eyes intent for any sign that the crocodiles had not been scared away by the noise.